Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War by Kit Kowol

The Second World War was a “People’s War” during which Labour prepared the great reforming measures it would implement after 1945, while the Conservatives were intellectually moribund and devoted no thought to the policies needed once the war had been won.

This, according to Kit Kowol, is the received, but mistaken, view of the period 1940-45, and about that error he is probably correct. As he remarks in his conclusion, British political history “tends to be written from the Labour point of view…the Left is still considered as the engine of history, even when the engine has been set to reverse”.

Kowol contends that during the war, much Conservative thinking about the problems of peace did in fact take place. In an article for The Listener on 2nd January 1941, entitled “Establishing a Christian civilisation”, Rab Butler, at this point still a junior Foreign Office minister, said the difference between Britain and Germany is that “we acknowledge a final spiritual authority”, whereas “Hitler regards the State as the final authority”.

Butler said the key to the future was to avoid a clash between these two loyalties, and this could be achieved by building up a “British Community governed by Christian ideals”.

In 1942 the same case was made at greater length in a report from the Education Sub-Committee, chaired by Butler, of the Post-War Problems Central Committee, a Conservative Party body set up in May 1941.

The committee looked at France, where anti-clericalism and lack of state support for religion lay behind spiritual and military collapse; at Germany, where National Socialism had become an ersatz religion; and at Russia, where religious feeling had been channelled into materialist Communism. It concluded that “no modern state could adopt an attitude of indifference to religion”.

Kowol points out that 12 National Days of Prayer were held during the Second World War, three more than in the First World War.

And in 1944, Kowol reminds us, Butler, who served from 1941-45 as President of the Board of Education, put through the Education Act, which for the first time made Christian education compulsory in all State-maintained schools.

Labour did not dominate the Home Front during the war: a larger number of ministries were in Conservative hands, including agriculture, where Kowol detects four different schools of Conservative thought about food.

The maintenance of the British Empire was from Churchill downwards a tremendously important goal, but here too there were deep differences of opinion about how to achieve this.

Lord Beaverbrook, who called himself an “Imperial isolationist”, saw the United States as a threat to his native Canada, and to a British Empire which he believed could thrive as an independent trading bloc. He came to see, Kowol remarks, “a close relationship with the USSR” as “an antidote to American imperialism”, and was keen as Minister of Supply to build tanks for the Red Army.

But the alliance with the USSR was hard to reconcile with idea of a war fought in defence of Christian civilisation. It appalled such Roman Catholic writers as Evelyn Waugh and J R R Tolkien, and was denounced by The Catholic Herald.

Left-wing historians doubtless need to be reminded by Kowol of the importance of Christianity, and of the British Empire, in Conservative thought at this time.

But these factors should be obvious to anyone familiar with the speeches delivered by Churchill. On 18th June 1940 he referred both to Christian civilisation and to the Empire:

“What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire… Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth  ^{last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”}

Nor is it unknown to Conservative historians that thought was being given within the party to politics after the war. Here is Robert Blake in his history of the Conservative Party, first published in 1970:

“The Conservatives did not neglect the problems of the peace. Various committees investigated them and their reports were to form the basis of an election programme in 1945, in many ways as forward-looking as that of Labour.”

No author can cover every aspect of this subject, but it is a pity that Kowol, in his first book, omits Sir Henry Willink and has next to nothing to say about William Beveridge.

Willink, Conservative MP for Croydon North from 1940-48 and Minister of Health from 1943-45, was a public servant of high intellect, and can be seen on a news reel of 1944 explaining, in clipped and kindly tones, the new national medical service which will be established after the war.

A White Paper had just been published on this topic, but Willink assures viewers that it is not “a cut and dried scheme”: it will be discussed in Parliament, he wants all concerned to talk about it, “and you, everyone in this audience, are very much concerned”.

But although Willink’s honesty of intention shines through his broadcast, he was no politician, did not take well after 1945 to life in opposition, and while challenging the plan of his successor, Nye Bevan, to nationalise the voluntary hospitals, conveyed the unfortunate impression that the Conservatives were opposed to the setting up of the NHS.

An NHS designed by Willink might well have possessed better foundations than Bevan’s did, but Bevan won, and has continued to win, the politics of health.

When I profiled Willink for ConHome in 2018, it appeared that not much had been written about him. One must hope some shy, retiring scholar is even now at work on a proper book.

Why at the general election of 1945 did the public entrust the creation of the NHS, and of other parts of the welfare state, to Labour rather than the Conservatives? Blake makes the astute point that the Conservative programme, while neither reactionary nor static, was affected by another weakness:

“It did not lack content, but it lacked credibility. The trouble was that people did not believe that the Conservatives meant what they said, whereas they thought on the whole that Labour did.”

William Beveridge, described by Robin Harris in The Conservatives: A History as “a relatively old-school Liberal”, brought out his famous report on the setting up of a welfare state in December 1942.

The report was extremely popular. Churchill himself declared – in a broadcast on 21st March 1943 in which the word “Beveridge” did not pass his lips – his support for “national compulsory insurance for all classes, for all purposes, from the cradle to the grave”.

But many Conservatives were worried that Beveridge’s proposals were unaffordable, and this should have been part of Kowol’s story. Harris quotes Ralph Assheton, a free-market-minded Conservative MP who was at this time serving as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who noted:

“One of the chief troubles about the Beveridge Report is that whereas the diagnosis relates to Want, his proposals are very largely devoted to giving money to people who are not in Want.”

This, as Harris says, “was the heart of the welfare problem, and arguably still is”.

Kowol remarks that the Conservatives were not short of policies, but were short of agreement on what these should be. When it came to writing the manifesto in 1945 they found a large number of “difficult subjects” on which they were divided, so the document had to remain quite vague.

Vague manifestos have much to commend them, but can have the drawback of communicating infirmity of purpose. Churchill greatly disliked being tied down by specific commitments.

Butler, who was supposed to be helping with publicity, found himself obliged, Kowol relates, to write to Churchill two months out from the election “to get clarification of what he called the ‘general tone’ and ‘theme song’ of the campaign”.

Churchill, it may be recalled, had been in the wilderness in the 1930s, and from 1904-24 had spent 20 years as a Liberal. He liked to rely, when working out what should be done about some great question of the day, on an eclectic mixture of advisers, few of whom were Conservatives.

If instead of being overthrown and dying in 1940, Neville Chamberlain had still been leading the Conservative Party, he would have known exactly which policies he intended to enact over the next five years.

In 1924, Chamberlain amazed his Cabinet colleagues by presenting them with a list of 25 measures which he proposed, as Minister of Health, to enact in the course of the next Parliament, 21 of which did indeed become law.

But for the unwelcome intervention of Hitler, Chamberlain as Prime Minister would have continued with health reforms which would in all likelihood have rendered the creation of the NHS in its present form unnecessary.

Butler was a disciple of Chamberlain, and after the defeat of 1945 set to work in the Conservative Research Department (founded by Chamberlain in 1929; closed down in 1940; very slightly revived towards the end of the war) on the formation of new Conservative policies in the light of the dramatic changes made by the Attlee Government.

To Churchill belongs the imperishable glory of defiance in 1940, and leading the nation through many trials and tribulations to victory in 1945.

But Kowol’s valiant attempts to demonstrate the richness of Conservative thought in the period 1940-45 should not blind us to the plain fact that before 1940, under Chamberlain, and after 1945, when under Butler a galaxy of talent set to work in CRD, the party had a far greater capacity to produce policies which were actually worth implementing.